[threatripper]

While you are right in a way, I think you miss the point. In the past "computer" was a job description and mechanical power came from serfs. They surely developed skills we are lacking today but I'd argue that overall the world is a better place with digital computers and electrical motors. It frees up these people to do something else, something of higher value.

[rwl]

Sure, the world is a better place with fewer serfs in it, but what exactly is of "higher value" than being a research mathematician? It's already a profession that consists essentially of exercising our highest and most distinctly human capacities: creativity, abstract reasoning, and passing the results of those on through a distinctive language and culture. I don't think the comparison with serfs is useful.

I'm sure most research mathematicians would like more freedom from some of the drudgery of their work (grading, admin, etc.), just like the rest of us. But we should be aiming for a world that allows more people to become mathematicians, not fewer.

[XenophileJKO]

Sure, recreational mathematicians. Just like people that like to ride horses for fun.

[gabaix]

Constant recreation may be the ultimate purpose of humanity.

[Der_Einzige]

This but unironically

[vitally3643]

Put another way, wage slavery is not the ultimate purpose of humanity.

[andai]

> But we should be aiming for a world that allows more people to become mathematicians, not fewer.

Yeah. UBI. We'll probably be seeing that in the next 15 years.

(In Europe, at least. In America the culture may not be able to stomach it, and I see even odds of a massive fake jobs program instead.)

[bluealienpie]

We argued that AI would free us to explore the arts. Instead it first came for written language and images. So what's left when it can write all the programs, drive all the cars, and AI sensors on farms can monitor and distribute nutrients. I remember watching TED Talks about how AI weapons need to be carefully studied, and instead we see them autonomously picking targets. I'm not seeing any higher values, instead I'm seeing how we're on a path to assured destruction.

[noufalibrahim]

I see that point of view but there's another that I've recently been thinking about.

Many of the fields that were traditionally considered for "smart" people (STEM etc.) are the ones that are being really hammered by AI. Whereas, things which people considered lightweight often involving social relationships and interpersonal skills are still beyond the scope of AI (much of it even theoretically beyond the scope although perhaps robots might have an effect there).

There used to be a sysad T-shirt from the BOFH days "Go away or I'll replace you with a very small shell script" which pushed the idea that whatever could be replaced by a computer was something trivial. Now we find that the things which we thought were only for "smart people" are the very things being replaced by computer programs which is telling. Perhaps what we considered tough and smart really wasn't.

[oblio]

This is actually a very old AI insight, acknowledged at least as early as the 80s, let me see if I can find the quote.

Found it:

> Rodney Brooks explains that, according to early AI research, intelligence was "best characterized as the things that highly educated male scientists found challenging", such as chess, symbolic integration, proving mathematical theorems and solving complicated word algebra problems. "The things that children of four or five years could do effortlessly, such as visually distinguishing between a coffee cup and a chair, or walking around on two legs, or finding their way from their bedroom to the living room were not thought of as activities requiring intelligence. Nor were any aesthetic judgments included in the repertoire of intelligence-based skills.

[gowld]

Brooks is weirdly sexist, but it's unsurprising that (higher) "intelligence" should mean things that are hard, not things that are easy.

[FabHK]

Moravec's paradox:

> "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox

[jmalicki]

But the hard things are things a child can do.

The things like proving complicated theorems are things that are acquired by education within a lifetime, and that's why they're easy for AI.

The things a child can do are acquired through millions of years of evolution. While they don't require much explicit education, that doesn't mean they're easier.

[noufalibrahim]

Fair enough but even thing acquired within a lifetime have a hierarchy. Many societies, for example, assume that the kids who are good in Math are smart but the ones who write well or are exemplary in "co-curricular" subjects simply aren't that bright.

As an example, the kid who can solve Math problems has less of an edge over AI than the kid who automatically becomes the captain of the neighbourhood football team but older human beings often assume that the former is smarter.

[oblio]

I'm a guy and stereotypes exist for a reason.

Also, who do you think were the vast majority of AI researcher in the 50s, 60s, 70s?

[jrflowers]

> I'm a guy and stereotypes exist for a reason.

What reason is that?

[oblio]

> Brooks is weirdly sexist, but it's unsurprising that (higher) "intelligence" should mean things that are hard, not things that are easy.

Way to miss the mark (and also shift the discussion to woke conversation points on a comment from 4+ decades ago).

The point of his entire comment is that it seems like the "hard things" (aka abstract science) will be a lot harder for AI than "easy things" (a 5 year old or a dog understanding their environment in great detail, from depth perception to smells, sounds, etc, etc).

Your comment looks like it was written by exactly the kind of man Brooks was mocking.

[noufalibrahim]

Thanks. Is this quote from a book?

[oblio]

https://archive.org/details/robotfutureoffle0000broo/mode/2u...

[andai]

AI has autism. To emulate the normie is an impossible task.

[jmalicki]

Picking vegetables is still really tough for robots.

Pick and place robots, or humanoid robots that can fold laundry, are still a lot tougher than automating knowledge workers and a lot more expensive to the point it's questionable if they're worth it.

We may not be on a path to assured destruction, we may be on a path to becoming livestock.

[drfloyd51]

When I was a child, I lived in a neighborhood. Every week a garbage truck picked up the house hold trash.

5 guys were on that truck. 1 driver and 4 guys that actually lifted up various shaped trash cans and dumped them into the truck.

Today I live in an apartment complex. 100 families take their trash to the compactor. 1 guy in a garbage truck comes once a week to collect the compacted refuse.

I wonder what happened to the other 4 guys. 80% of the garbage collecting labor… freed up to do something of higher value.

Maybe they cured cancer.

[dev_l1x_be]

The cancer of p50 users having comfy housing, 2 cars and a life. Almost all of the efficiency gains move to the 1%.

[gowld]

They were already available to do something of higher value. Automation frees them up to do something of lower value.

[perching_aix]

I wonder too, could you maybe actually check your theory?

[drfloyd51]

My sarcasm wasn’t thick enough.

L

[perching_aix]

On the contrary, only your sarcasm was thick, not the substance behind it. Kind of what I'm yapping about if you'd be kind enough to notice.

What you propose makes fine rhetorical sense, and I can assure you it did reach me, it's just that a (very) cursory search yielded me no significant employment rate changes or drastic layoffs in the related sector over the decades. Instead, it suggested that people have been reshuffled to do waste sorting and other related activities rather, and that the field actually grew, directly contradicting your smug, sarcasm-laden, willfully demagogue framing. Traits that are not exactly the hallmark of epistemic rigor to begin with, nor do they further it, even if the given narrative did hold up.

It's so easy to be asinine and make up a story, especially when one feels morally justified in doing so, and considers the base facts & analogy to be "obviously correct". I don't think that setting people up for failure by feeding them correct sounding lies - or sending related discourse into a nosedive in quality just to get in some cheap zingers - would help the cause a whole lot though. Do you?

Put differently, it helps if the example provided actually holds up as an example for the topic discussed. Especially if that example is as dramatic as 80% of a given job disappearing, and the people involved just plain losing their livelihood supposedly.

[oblio]

> In the past "computer" was a job description and mechanical power came from serfs.

Serfs, all right, but in what world do you live where "computers", people who did manual computing (i.e. mechanical additions/multiplications/... with very large numbers) are the same as actual research mathematicians, who are basically pure logicians?

The only perspective where it makes sense to root for mathematicians to go away is if you're a misandrist that thinks humanity should be replaced by robots (for reasons...). Or isn't logic something that's a defining human trait, and one of the main reasons we became the dominant species on the planet?

[golemotron]

I don't think that "root[ing] for mathematicians to go away" is the problem. The problem (if there is one) is that the process by which that occurs is economically determined. No amount of complaining will stop AI from being useful in mathematics or erase the incentives to make it better. It's automatic process, like photography sidelining painting or shoe factories sidelining cobblers. We go through this with every technological advance and the outcomes are pretty much determined. No cheerleaders are needed.

[oblio]

Nothing in history is inevitable.